Fidel and the Faithful

Thomas C. Oden

The tang of the fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and the bouquet of moist
avocados still linger in my memory. I can still hear the sounds of
squeaking bicycle wheels and smell the stench of highway diesels. Now,
Proust-like, I sit in New Jersey trying to reconstruct my times past in
Cuba.

Invited late last year by the Methodist Bishop of Cuba to address the
Ecumenical Seminary at Matanzas, I went to listen to the voices of Cuban
Christians. My motive: to attend carefully to the specific timbre of
their voices, to hear exactly what they were saying, and to bring their
thoughts to a North American audience.

It is difficult for non-Cuban Americans to get into Cuba except by
specific invitation. Thus for years there was a motley parade of
ecclesial sycophants making their way to the country to pay homage to
Fidel and condemn American policy. Knowing that I could not even pretend
to do the same, I was relieved to discover that it was no longer
necessary. Formerly, the only link between Cuban evangelical
congregations and the North American Christian laity had been an ultra-
liberal church bureaucracy whose liberation theology rhetoric had now
come to sound extremely dated and passe to Cubans, with the result that
communication had become rather disjointed between Cuban
postrevolutionary Christian revivalism and American church bureaucrats.

The posters in Havana's Jose Marti Airport gave me my first glimpse of a
seismic shift taking place in Cuban consciousness. Near the airport one
could see faded Spartan red and black posters declaring "Socialism or
Death." But in the airport proper one found freshly painted murals of
scuba divers, surfers, colonial architecture, and exciting night life-a
frank appeal to tourism.

I was never once hungry in Cuba. The staple foods are a delicious rice
and black beans, a lot of fresh fruit, many textures of breads. Then
there is that marvelous Cuban ice cream.

I was reminded of my boyhood days in Oklahoma in the thirties. We never
once thought of ourselves as poor, though Oklahoma was as hard hit as
any state by the depression. Cuban parents are similarly proud as they
engage in a constant battle to provide enough calories for their
families. Many material goods are, of course, simply unavailable. What
is learned in an economy like this is: you get by, you invent. You enjoy
what you can-everyone in Cuba, for instance, seems to enjoy dancing.
When I was a kid, we never threw anything away, and repeatedly recycled
what we had. That is what Cuba feels like to me. Under these conditions
you become very creative. Take automobiles, for example. They are kept
running for decades after their contemporaries have disappeared from
Miami streets.

In Matanzas City I walk past a movie theater whose paint is peeling on
the outside, but inside its lobby remains daringly elegant, with its
marble floors, mahogany furniture, and a graceful old Spanish colonial
ambience. A hand-made sign announced the next movie: Falling in Love
in the USA-in color.

I step into a dank and dimly lit government food store, where powdered
milk is going for two pesos per kilo, but only when available. The rice
was advertised as imported. Other prices listed were sugar, black beans,
and onions. Very little stock was visible. Next door an orthopedic shoe
was priced at twenty-three pesos, other shoes for fifteen. A few doors
down was the Vietnam Bookstore, with titles displayed such as The
History of Precapitalist Economy, How to Build a House, a
medical textbook, and The More Transparent Region by Carlos
Fuentes.

Unforgettable for me was the sight of the lean faces of Cubans looking
into the window of a "dollar store," gazing upon the consumer world of
soap and perfume and electronics from which they are barred. Since I had
dollars, I was permitted into this elite supermarket world of glimmering
goods, as hungry faces peered in through the glass. Still, this does not
seem to be greatly diminishing their actual levels of happiness.
Consumer goods seem far less important to the scale of happiness than
North American consumers take them to be. I see a young couple holding
hands as they walk by. What else do they need? They have each other.

Yet any statement one makes about Cuba always seems in the next breath
to be partly wrong, crying out for qualification the moment after it is
observed. Every accurate report thus has to be dialectical, descriptive
of unfolding juxtapositions.

Many factories and businesses are either closed or working half time,
due to the oil shortage. I could see oil wells pumping in many places,
yet Cuba itself is supplying only about 5 percent of its petroleum
needs.

During the Soviet dependency there was never really any unemployment to
speak of. Now when a factory is closed down, people may try to find
another job, perhaps in agriculture, sometimes with retraining. What
makes things so difficult for ordinary families is that the 150-200
pesos the government gives for monthly salary does not supply sufficient
calories to survive. 150 pesos trades on the free market for a couple of
dollars. Professionals may make 250 pesos, but all they can buy is what
is rationed out in the government food stores, whose shelves are often
mostly empty. A tube of toothpaste or bar of soap would cost most of
one's monthly salary in pesos-if one could only find it to buy. Even one
who has pesos often cannot buy anything with them.

Cubans have become economically creative. They bargain and barter among
themselves. They often find ways of pilfering from their jobs, or they
hustle as entrepreneurs. If someone works in a factory making coffee, he
may find ways of marketing coffee privately. If another works in a
plumbing parts factory, he becomes a part-time plumber.

It is no longer illegal to hold dollars; no one is arrested as he would
have been a few years ago. But dollars are hard to come by. Tragically,
the rapid growth of prostitution is evidence of how desperate young
single mothers have become in shifting to a dollar economy.

There are more professionals in Cuba than in any other Latin American
country. Anyone can acquire a free education if only he solemnly pledges
to rule out all talk of God or any religious premise for social change.
But just having an education does not mean you have a job or income.

When I asked a friend how long the people will put up with this, he
first reminded me that he could go to jail for answering, and then told
me:

Once it was the case that if you did not support
the government, you could not get a job or an education. Now
more and more are needing less and less from the government
to survive. Increasingly the government does not have much
more than words to offer. As people depend less and less
upon the regime, they have more freedom to think for
themselves politically. Cuba may be in the last months or
years of this system.

The prevailing ideology is now popularly called not socialism but socio-
ism-which means "who you knowism." Socio means friend. What you get
depends on whom you know. If you have a friend who works in a TV
factory, for instance, you may have a way to get your TV repaired. After
the collapse of the Soviet Union the economy has been reduced to barter
and hustle.

No Cubans I met were tempted to counterrevolutionary violence. Only
expatriate Cubans fantasize that scenario.

Socialist educational policies have ravaged the family, once the very
centerpiece of traditional Cuban life. Young people as a matter of
educational policy are separated from their parents for several years at
puberty. The kids must leave their families and go off to study
socialism and work in rural cooperatives. They are sent to schools far
away. But lately the young people are coming back to their families in
droves. Like almost everything else in Cuba, the family separation
policy is not working.

Free love may not be encouraged, but it is offered no moral restraints
by the official ideology. And AIDS has hit Cuba with a vengeance. An
HIV-positive readout will thrust one instantly and irreversibly into a
permanent quarantine in an isolated sanitarium. Women entering the work
force are often separated from their husbands for inordinate periods of
time. In short, the nuclear family is in an uphill struggle to survive
the assaults of socialist ideology. Still, there is no question that,
its damage having been done, that ideology has lost its grip.

It remains precarious to be a postrevolutionary Christian in Cuba. To be
sure, believers are gradually becoming less wary of surveillance by the
old neighborhood block informers. Still, I was able to tape record many
of my conversations with them only after receiving an anguished
permission. Some asked not to be recorded at all. Sometimes in the
course of a taped conversation I would be asked to turn off my recorder,
due to anxiety about the safety and well-being not of the speaker but of
his children.

The church itself is getting bolder, however, willing to suffer if
necessary for Christ's sake, just as many Christians are increasingly
willing to put their bodies on the line to attest the resurrected Lord.
Every adult baptism, for instance, is charged with a sense of great
consequence. In this environment, the commitment to personal evangelism
ranks above every other objective, far above any political
identification. In other words, whatever the future holds for the Cuban
government, the Cuban church is becoming clearer about its own
particular identity and mission. Any former identification of theology
with socialism has by now largely been shattered. Which does not mean
that the church has now become a self-conscious counterrevolutionary
force, but that its most characteristic form of decisive Christian
action is simply to make the gospel of Christ available to the Cuban
people.

Moreover, the church has determined to share the desperate poverty
created by socialism without relying on outside sources of support. A
phrase I heard repeatedly among Cuban Christians is "the church is
accompanying the people."

The metaphor of "accompanying" is contrasted with that of "departing"-
applied to those who have left the island. Those who left have
irretrievably left not only their wealth and property but their family
ties in Cuba. Thus those who remained behind are clearly distinguished
from those who departed. On this question we find an almost complete
polarization. The diaspora Cubans who left under duress and are
committed to returning feel that they have the right to participate in
the political future of the island. They have suffered a painful
disruption of their lives and families, they still love Cuba, and they
want to share in its future. Whereas the "homeland" Cubans feel that
those who departed did so voluntarily and most of them will never return
from their present lives of ease and prosperity; hence they have no
right to participate in the political future of the island. Many have
been gone thirty-five years; their kids are hooked on a standard of
living and economic expectations that could never be adjusted to the
actual conditions in their former homeland. This is the polarity that
now vexes the Cuban reality.

Among many devout Catholics and Protestants on the island, however, one
can now sense the beginning of a new spirit of reconciliation, not yet
strong, but growing: the view that all Cubans, both at home and abroad,
belong to one family and must remain so.

Whether the Castro regime stands or falls is a question that the
postrevolutionary Christians treat with considerable nonchalance. What
does matter to them is whether the church will continue to accompany the
people, walking in the Way. Cuban evangelicals now insist on
nonidentification with any political ideology. they especially resist
being identified with any loose counterrevolutionary talk, having
decided to walk patiently with the people who are determined to survive
all forms of political messianism, whether of the left or right.

To be sure, there is much anger directed at the old system of socialist
education and the failed command economy. Christians remember how some
schools founded by the churches were destroyed by mobs. They are mindful
of how church properties were vandalized after the revolution, of how
the old school in Santa Clara was converted to a Communist Party
headquarters. But there is a will to forgive and move on.

Some of these church educational institutions are coming back. There are
legal petitions now being submitted to reclaim them rightfully:
hospitals, church camps, parochial schools, church buildings, social
rehabilitation and mission agencies. In some cases where the original
property is not being returned, new options are being made available.
The regime is no longer able to ignore the claims of long-suffering
church plaintiffs.

The special challenge of the church in these times of spiritual crisis,
economic blockade, and physical hunger is to help people understand,
especially as they come to realize that the gods of Marxism-Leninism
will take them exactly nowhere, the hope that comes from God.

When many Protestant pastors left Cuba following 1959, the lay
leadership found itself entirely free to reinvent the church, with the
result that the present revival is being led by the laity and the youth
rather than by the clergy. The Catholic form of charismatic renewal,
like the Protestant, is largely a postrevolutionary youth-led movement.
Each month there are 1,600 or so baptisms of Catholic young people. They
come from wholly secularist forms of education, knowing almost nothing
of Christian symbols or holy writ, but desiring to learn.

And those members of the clergy who remained have been uncommonly
courageous about helping to enable this lay renewal-a true lesson in
providential missiology.

One of the results of the revolutionary period was the growth of the
house-church movement. This was not planned, but an outgrowth of
government policies that made it illegal either to renovate churches or
start new ones. The faithful learned that they could safely invite
people to their homes for prayer, testimony, hymn-singing, and Bible
study. Thus the resourcefulness and vitality of the Cuban church has
borne undeniable testimony.

One day I spoke with His Excellency, Jaime Ortega, Archbishop of Havana.
The archbishop had served in forced labor camps alongside Methodist
Bishop Joel Ajo. This seemed a most interesting circumstance. When I
asked whether there are any serious bilateral ecumenical conversations
between Methodists and Catholics, I got the same answer from the
Archbishop as I did from Methodist leaders. There are formally cordial
fraternal relations, but since the mid-seventies there have been fairly
deep strategic differences between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics
feel that the Protestant liberation theologians and the Ecumenical
Council have been too snug with Fidelismo. Protestants do not see the
Catholics as ready for any significant dialogue, still protecting their
privileged prerevolutionary turf. One could not escape the feeling that
if Protestants and Catholics could ever get together, the balance of
power in Cuba could shift dramatically. The regime undoubtedly delights
in watching the old enmities between Protestants and Papists being
rekindled. Would a unified Catholic-Protestant voice annoy the regime?,
I asked the Archbishop. "I do not ignore the possibility that the
government might wish to see greater disunity between Catholics and
Protestants, with the purpose of exercising greater control over the
religious opposition," he answered.

How did Catholics view the radical Presbyterian Confession of 1977 that
declared participation in the Marxist revolution to be a premise of
church membership and an expression of the kingdom of God? Archbishop
Ortega: "Protestant liberation theology has never had much impact upon
Cuban Catholics. It never resonated very deeply with the Cuban reality."

As for the serious rekindling of Protestant religion in Cuba, my first
glimpse of it was in an Afro-Caribbean Methodist Church on the sprawling
fringe of Havana. The church was jam-packed-filled to the brim. Many
were young people under twenty-five. Escorted to the front row, I was
wedged in as if with a shoehorn. Directly in front of me was an
electronic keyboard, a jerry-rigged assortment of archaic percussion
instruments, and a jumble of steel guitars and maroon tambourines. Cuban
Christian renewal was clearly coming alive to a strong Afro-Caribbean
beat.

The black pastor asked for someone to come forward who had never before
been to church. A couple brought up an infant-not for baptism, but for
earnest prayer looking toward a possible future baptism. Baptism is a
clear-cut countercultural decision in Cuba.

The prayer proceeded, and I noticed that a gaggle of neighborhood boys
were squinting through the windows, trying to get a glimpse of the
action. The communion liturgy was followed by fervid preaching, an
invitation to repentance and evangelical faith, and concluding with a
healing service that offered prayer for all who were infirm. As "glory
singers" led the congregation in impassioned, rafter-raising song, whole
families swayed together in heartfelt, rousing praise of the Lord, hands
uplifted. An invitation was given for all to offer thanks to God for
special graces of recent days.

It was a vivid, unforgettable, live happening of new birth. It could not
be fabricated. It was an unaffected, unpretentious work of God the
Spirit. The evidences of revival were the fervency of prayers, the
intensely felt presence of the Holy Spirit, lives being morally
transformed, behavior patterns reconstructed, courageous decisions made.
I knew instantly I was a part of this body, and they were living members
of the body of Christ in which I live and breathe. You are in my
prayers, I said. The white-necked North American walked through the
congregation exchanging warm greetings in the Lord.

As the cadence and intensity mounted in exuberance, the lights went off
unexpectedly-a frequent irritation of Cuban life today. A bright
kerosene lantern was quickly lit and brought in and hung swaying on the
ceiling, illuminating the singing, rocking congregation, which never
skipped a beat.

The preaching was as impassioned as the praise, its focus being that
each one is in a war with Satan. The final outcome at the end of history
we already know, but the struggle continues this side of the end in
every soul. Each one must do his own battle with Satan. You have never
met such an adversary. He presents himself to you as a friend. You
cannot afford to be naive about this combat. You will be mocked by
others. They will not understand you. They will scold you. But do not be
alarmed, and do not complain. These things of the flesh must be
understood through the spirit. Rejection is to be expected, even within
your own family. You are called now to make a decision, the preacher
continued. It could be the most important of your life: Accept Jesus in
your heart. Trust him for forgiveness of your sins. The Spirit was
ricocheting through the packed hall. Fourteen answered the invitation,
willing to put their lives and careers and resources on the line.
Several were young people, one a mother with a baby in her arms, another
a lean, strong man in khaki working clothes.

The sinner's prayer brought new life as the penitents prayed with the
pastor, repeating each phrase aloud: I repent of my sins. I accept Jesus
as my Savior and Lord. I want to be his servant. Give me grace to
follow, to engage without complaint in whatever battle is required, to
face rejection if necessary, to be faithful unto death. I renounce sin
and Satan. I belong to Christ. I want to walk in the way. Lift me up,
Lord, from my fallen condition, and present me reconciled to God the
Father. Later, many other congregants of all ages came forward for
prayer for the sick.

From that moment on, I decided I must not allow myself to be distracted
from the most consequential event in Cuba today: the work of the Spirit
to reawaken faith in God. I knew that I had to resist the temptation to
become fixated on political ephemera when a bona fide religious
reawakening was transpiring before my eyes.

Unquestionably a true revival of religion is unfolding. To North
American eyes, it appears at first glance to be very
charismatic. But on closer inspection the charismata have a
distinctively Cuban rhythm and sound and stamp. Later I would discover
that this religious revival is affecting the whole spectrum of Christian
communities from Roman Catholic to Baptist.

On another occasion, I was invited for pre-breakfast coffee by a
venerable professor who had witnessed three generations of change. In
his spare apartment, potent black coffee was served in a delicate
demitasse.

I asked about spiritual formation in the seminary. "Reading the Bible,
allowing the Word of God to address the inner precincts of the heart,"
he answered. "This is how the Spirit enables Christians to come alive."

The churches are full of secular rebounders searching for meaning, he
continued. Cuban Christianity is now at a point of development similar
to the first three centuries of Christianity, when the church was living
in a hostile environment. "Before Constantine, when the road was
extremely difficult, the church was empowered by the Spirit through
crisis after crisis. Then came Constantine and offered the church a
favored place in the world. That is when its deepest spiritual
temptations appeared. It was more difficult to be a Christian under
Constantine than under Marcus Aurelius, more difficult to test out the
promises of God. To live the Christian life is objectively just as
difficult in a consumer-oriented economy as in a deteriorating socialist
economy. Our faith calls us to live as if objectively insecure, so as to
be better able to receive the security that faith distinctively gives,
the security that abides through conflict and limitation."

In a Marxist society it is hardly a social advantage to be a Christian.
Christian existence becomes an exciting, risk-laden summons rather than
a boring obsession with establishment safety. "God only illumines the
next step, not long distances ahead. We would like the way to be
illumined for whole distance ahead, but the flickering light of the Word
shows only the next step. God called Abram: Leave Ur. I will then tell
you where you are going. To Paul he said: Go to the next city. I will
tell you there what next. The risen Lord said to his disciples: Go to
Galilee. You will find me there. It is humbling for the pilgrim to not
know what is over the hill, to have no more foreknowledge than the next
man. But this is precisely a part of our spiritual training-to take
small steps without knowing what is over the hill, but trusting God on
final outcomes. It is not enough that our students have enough to eat,
and books to read. They must also learn to look daily to God for
sufficiency."

The Cuban church is trying to decide whether it can bear the
responsibility for bringing hope to Cuba. To be responsible for hope is
to decide to bring hope in God into an otherwise hopeless situation. The
stark absence of hope is partly a function of the failure of socialism,
where humanistic hopes have been raised so precariously high. The
collapse of these hopes now offers an unexpected opportunity to the
proclaiming community to breathe out a new message of hope.

At the Ecumenical Seminary, all the students and faculty eat together,
three meals a day. "The little we have we want to share with all who sit
at our table," the rector said. "We do not want to have a table with
much food but without love."

As I walked into the seminary's library, I had the feeling I was back in
the antiquated city library of my youth during the 1930s. A large-print
Underwood typewriter, vintage circa 1946, was the sole technological
device in sight. I was shown a separate room of the library in which
students were given the privilege of reading books. Not checking them
out-reading them. Books are so rare and irreplaceable that the library
cannot afford to let them be checked out.

Could North American seminarians send you books, I asked? Well, not by
mail. They would likely be pilfered or lost in the mail. Why lost?
Either they would be rerouted for profit through the black market or
simply mislaid. A few might get through. How then could I deliver books?
Try Cuban pastors in the U.S. who will then contact Cubans in transit to
Havana. Is this dangerous? No, the police do not surveil books coming
into Cuba with airline passengers.

As I sat in a modest apartment cradling a tiny cup of ebony coffee, one
of the theological students calmly fleshed out this idea: The Methodist
Church was born in America amid a sacramental void resulting from the
Anglican clergy having fled to Canada. Thus American Methodism can
rightly be said to be born out of the hunger for holy communion, for
Wesley would never have ordained Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury apart
from this long-standing, unresolved sacramental crisis. In just this
way, the student continued, the Cuban church today, feeling, as it does,
cut off from the rest of the ecumenical whole, especially treasures holy
communion, and feels its unity with the body of Christ through the
sacrament.

Here was an example of how the Cuban church spirit shows an
extraordinary capacity to generate theological insight despite severe
limitations. I have pondered and taught the documents of the Wesley
literary corpus to graduate and theological students for three decades,
but had never before that moment heard what now seems to me an almost
obvious thesis stated so arrestingly. This student belongs to a Cuban
Methodist family that remained in Cuba after the 1959 revolution. Only a
few pastors were able to offer holy communion and baptize in due order.
The hunger for the Eucharist never faded, and although eucharistic
practice had become sporadic and uncertain, there is a deep
postrevolutionary desire to rediscover a more meaningful sacramental
life.

Buzzards circled the valley below the Seminary. A stone's throw away
from the seminary grounds, I noticed a lone black buzzard sitting
patiently fifty feet atop a high tree overlooking the leafy valley. His
accomplices circling the valley below flew effortlessly, exploiting the
wind. The freedom and ease of their flight was positively stately. What
was it that was dying in the valley? A revolution. A system. An economy.
A dream. A rhetoric. Insects, too, remain profusely alive on this lush
green island. Everywhere this miniature biotic world is prospering amid
the collapse of colossal economic and ideological schemes. The grass is
growing fast around Matanzas harbor. Castro's revolution is being
overtaken by time, despair, and frustrated hope. New hope must come from
elsewhere.

Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Bates Professor at Drew University's
Graduate School and Theological School and author of Life in the
Spirit, the third and final volume of his systematic theology.